Welcome to The Real Story

The Real Story is a celebration of creative nonfiction. Not that there’s anything wrong with fiction. Look, we like making stuff up as much as anyone else does, but we’re more excited about the creative possibilities of telling the truth. We love true stories (and even mostly true stories), personal essays, memoirs, diaries, sketches and literary journalism. Reality is so much stranger than fiction. Tastes better, too.

To whet your appetite for our first reading event, here’s a new essay by Adam Farrer, ‘The Lump’. Adam will be reading it, alongside Laura Barton, Benjamin Judge and co-editors Nija Dalal and Kate Feld on January 20 at 7:30pm at Gulliver’s in Manchester. More info here. Image by Emma Farrer. —– ...

Hey essayists, creative nonfictioneers, prose poets… we want to hear from you! If you’re based in or near Manchester and like the idea of getting up onstage and reading your work in front of people, make yourselves known to us. We at The Real Story are in the beginning stages of organising an occasional...

Photo by Ian Turk via Flickr Short nonfiction from Danielle Peet: — She started as a whisper in a symphony. One of nine; the fifth. As the third girl she screams in the shadow of the other two. A further four survive after her. Twins are lost to diptheria; an ailment seeming to...

Anneliese Mackintosh’s debut short story collection begins on an unnumbered page, obscured among the standard initial copyright & about the author pages. What I’m saying is that it’s a page you might miss, if you were a casual reader. It’s a page you don’t want to miss. Here’s what it says: 68% happened....